Personal audio devices, including wireless telephones, such as mobile/cellular telephones, cordless telephones, MP3 players, and other consumer audio devices, are in widespread use. Such personal audio devices may include circuitry for driving a pair of headphones or one or more speakers. Such circuitry often includes a speaker driver, including a power amplifier for driving an audio output signal to headphones or speakers.
One existing approach to driving an audio output signal is to employ a playback path for including an active digital-to-analog converter for converting a digital audio signal into an intermediate analog signal, and an output amplifier for amplifying the analog signal to generate the audio output signal. However, the digital-to-analog converter may undesirably consume significant amounts of power.